Eugenic Feminism

Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India

Asha Nadkarni

Publication Year: 2014

Asha Nadkarni contends that whenever feminists lay claim to citizenship based on women’s biological ability to “reproduce the nation” they are participating in a eugenic project—sanctioning reproduction by some and prohibiting it by others. Employing a wide range of sources from the United States and India, Nadkarni shows how the exclusionary impulse of eugenics is embedded within the terms of nationalist feminism.

Nadkarni reveals connections between U.S. and Indian nationalist feminisms from the late nineteenth century through the 1970s, demonstrating that both call for feminist citizenship centered on the reproductive body as the origin of the nation. She juxtaposes U.S. and Indian feminists (and antifeminists) in provocative and productive ways: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian novels regard eugenic reproduction as a vital form of national production; Sarojini Naidu’s political speeches and poetry posit liberated Indian women as active agents of a nationalist and feminist modernity predating that of the West; and Katherine Mayo’s 1927 Mother India warns white U.S. women that Indian reproduction is a “world menace.” In addition, Nadkarni traces the refashioning of the icon Mother India, first in Mehboob Khan’s 1957 film Mother India and Kamala Markandaya’s 1954 novel Nectar in a Sieve, and later in Indira Gandhi’s self-fashioning as Mother India during the Emergency from 1975 to 1977.

By uncovering an understudied history of feminist interactivity between the United States and India, Eugenic Feminism brings new depth both to our understanding of the complicated relationship between the two nations and to contemporary feminism.

Title Page, Copyright Page, Dedication

Contents

Introduction: Eugenic Feminism and the Problem of National Development

Speaking in a 1935 radio broadcast in Bombay titled “What
Birth Control Can Do for India,” American birth control pioneer
Margaret Sanger outlined the importance of reproductive control to
the incipient Indian nation. Long sympathetic to the cause of Indian
independence (at this point still twelve years away), Sanger trotted out...

1 Perfecting Feminism: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Eugenic Utopias

In a 1895 poem titled “The Burden of Mothers: A Clarion Call
to Redeem the Race!,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman characteristically
places women’s reproductive powers at the center of nation building.
On the grounds that “through [women] comes the race” (8), she insists
as long as women are “fettered with gold or with iron” (7) humanity...

Speaking in London in 1913, Indian nationalist and poet
Sarojini Naidu challenges the notion that Indian women are hostages
of tradition, patiently awaiting enlightenment from the West. Instead
she traces a feminist genealogy to India’s distant past, insisting that
“all these new ideas about the essential equality of man and woman...

3 “World Menace”: National Reproduction, Public Health, and the Mother India Debate

The controversy surrounding the 1927 publication of
Katherine Mayo’s Mother India was arguably the most important pre-independence
event between U.S. and Indian feminisms. An imperialist
polemic against Indian self- rule thinly disguised as journalistic
exposé, Mother India’s portrayal of the subcontinent as a cesspool of...

Despite the formal equality granted to women by the
Indian Constitution and the continued visibility of elite nationalist
feminists in politics, the decades following Indian independence have
been labeled the “‘silent period’ of the women’s movement.”1 The
mainstream women’s organizations (such as the All-India Women’s...

On August 15, 1975, just a little less than two months after her declaration
of a state of Emergency, Indira Gandhi gave an Independence
Day address at the Red Fort in Delhi. In it, she outlined a new vision
for democracy and independence for the postcolonial nation, arguing,
“Independence does not merely mean a Government by Indians. It
means that the Government should be capable of taking independent...

EPILOGUE: Transnational Surrogacy and the Neoliberal Mother India

Zippi Brand Frank’s 2009 documentary Google Baby opens
with this meliorist account of how technology has transformed reproduction
into an act determined less by chance than by the market.
In doing so it draws a series of equivalences between different historical
moments and technologies, comparing the 1960s invention of...

Acknowledgments

Writing this book has been a lesson in gratitude. My greatest debt
is to Josie Saldaña, who not only has been an amazing advisor and
friend but whose own work on development, subjectivity, and feminism
continues to inspire me. Josie always knows to push me when I
need it and talk me down from the ledge in moments of panic; her support...

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